It’s October. Let’s talk about souls. In multiple ways.

The works in this issue by and large have something to do with that essence, that thing within us that makes us unique, makes us ... us. In some sense it’s what gives us our identity, and you’ll find some of the pieces herein speak as much to that as to a “soul” in the spiritual sense; identity and the loss thereof is much like losing one’s essence, and if you lose your essence, what have you become? What can you become? Conversely, if you lose your physical body, if you change bodies, but your soul is still intact, what does that mean? Are you still you? What is identity, anyway?

This sounds like a lead-in to stories about people transferring their souls to robot bodies, but ... nope! None of that. You’ll just have to read the issue lol.

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In that same realm of “soul=identity” and yet switching gears to a different kind of soul-sucking/soul-baring device, I also want to talk about our new old friend/frenemy, social media, which has become both necessary and evil if you want to get the word out for, well, anything. As politics heat up once again we have an ever-more fractured social media landscape wherein it looks like absolutely none of the problems revealed over the last eight years have been addressed—or they’ve even been negatively addressed, making the problems worse. Social media barons worry about “identity,” too—but only whether a user is a “bot” and not a true human being whose data—the social media term for “essence” —can be sold repeatedly to the corporate umbrella world that can then turn around and sell us the rot that destroys our souls. That essence can also be sold to governments in order that they, too, might more easily control us (I think some politicians would much rather we were a group of easily controllable bots than actual thinking beings, but manipulating our essence would seem their next favorite thing). Social media has become, in a word, dangerous, both for what we put into it and for what it puts into us.

The thing is, social media could be used as a public good—on its face, such a widespread dissemination of information is a good thing, an educative thing. It has, at its best, been used to free people from tyranny (although this was largely before governments figured out how to use it themselves). I think the ideal social media platform should be non-profit; ideally funded through donations or through grants, not through selling advertising or user data. In fact, there shouldn’t be any advertising at all, nor should there be any data collection—and no algorithms to serve up the latest outrage or calamity. If I want to see those things, there should be a way for me, as the user, to request certain kinds of information, or to view certain accounts—but really isn’t this just like searching for hashtags and following people? Absent the outrage machine, absent such algorithms, I feel like it would be a much saner, safer, more useful platform.

Of course, there are those who profit greatly from the Way Things Are (no matter how much they complain about it), and there are even those users who desire or even need the outrage to be served into their feeds every day. And that’s fine. But there should be at least one social media platform where we aren’t bombarded by manufactured hatred and algorithmic Othering. And that’s the thing I’m not seeing with all these Twitter replacements; they all want to use the same basic for-profit data-gathering model as all the others. (I mean, please tell me if you know of one that isn’t.)

A non-profit, public-good social media platform might be enough to turn the tide away from polarization in this country. It will certainly do a better job of protecting our identities. It may even save our souls.

Jeff Georgeson
Managing Editor
Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine